I had a wonderful time at YAPC::EU in Riga this year. Riga is a very beautiful city – there’s many nice things to look at, not to mention the excellent food and a wide range of beer at sensible prices. Once place I went had over 30 types of beer on tap! That’s the city, but then there was the YAPC itself: smooth running, well organized, nice venue, all breaks and lunches on site, and a great conference dinner. I’ve had the fortune to be at many events where Andrew Shitov has led the organization (I just checked and I think this must have been the 9th one!), and I knew he could do something excellent for YAPC::EU. He did, and was a very deserving recipient of a White Camel award this year. So, congrats to Andrew, and many thanks for the steady stream of excuses to travel to East Europe and talk about Perl. :-)

I gave a couple of talks.

Rakudo Evolved: Speed, Feedback and Hackability covered my work on 6model and Rakudo over the last year, and laid out some of the plans for the coming year. It had some code, but was more of a wordy talk: some theory, some lessons learned, some plans.